It’s Britain, 1977, and if you’re not punk, you’re not worth knowing. Unless you’re the Stranglers, who were like punk’s mean older brother, more sophisticated, and tougher in a street fighting sort of way. Also, they had a sort of existential edge as a song like Get A Grip On Yourself makes clear. Yeah, society’s f***ed, the world’s going up in apocalyptic flames. No reason to lose your cool, man.
“In which young Elvis Costello smartly, smugly reminds us of what we were all doing back in 1977, and probably last week for that matter. For me, it started when I was maybe seven, flipping through one of those Time-Life picture books about the planet Earth. It told me the world was going to end in about four billion years. An inconceivably long time for sure, but still The End. In a small, yet significant way, everything suddenly changed, such that a few years later, when I started getting clear on things like the arms race, the Doomsday Clock, global thermo-nuclear war, Apocalypse in our time – well, it wasn’t such a big deal, I was already waiting for it.” (Philip Random)
Killing Joke were mixing metal with repetitive beats with their own unique apocalyptic take on life-the-universe-everything long before it was a thing, and to solid, intense effect as Wardance makes abundantly clear. “It’s a 1980 track but I didn’t hear it until 1982, with the Falklands War in full weird roar far, far away. An apparently civilized nation going enthusiastically to war for a more or less random chunk of rock in the remote South Atlantic. It had to be a joke, definitely a joke. And it would kill almost a thousand people before it was done.” (Philip Random)
“Aphrodite’s Child are a weird one from the 1960s, a sort of pop-psychedelic outfit that managed to be both sonically extreme and sentimentally cloying, sometimes in the same song. And oh yeah, they came from Greece. You Always Stand In My Way goes resolutely for the extreme edge of things, with singer Demis Roussos (who would eventually settle into a prosperous career as an easy listening fave) giving his wailing all, whilst keyboardist Vangelis (yes, that Vangelis) tears things up on lead mellotron. I actually found this one in a yard sale sometime in the early 90s, maybe paid a buck for it, the guy who sold it to me sort of scratching his head and mumbling, oh yeah, this bloody record.” (Philip Random)
Leon Russell, everybody’s favourite underappreciated genius of the past fifty years, takes Bob Dylan’s surrealized hymn to ongoing apocalypse and renders it soulfully, gospelly, funkily (almost) fun. So much so that Dylan would be following that road himself in a few years through the land of rolling thunder.
Second of two in a row from Midnight Oil, who by the mid-80s weren’t just wearing their progressive politics on their sleeves, their front man Peter Garrett was actually running for office (no he didn’t win, but he would eventually). Red Sails At Sunset was their album of the moment (telling big scary, ugly truths about racism, nuclear apocalypse, environmental meltdown), with Best Of Both World standing tall as a possible alternative Australian national anthem. “I’d stand for it.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 